I’d like to share with you the OPMC online business journey, and I how I feel it sets us apart as a specialist in online store solutions for businesses.
There’s 100’s if not thousands of people who can make you an online store business in Sydney, or your local area.
If you don’t know a web developer, you might have a friend of a friend who’s a designer. Maybe you’ve roped a cousin or niece into helping you set up your new online store business.
It’s so easy to make a website these days, anyone can do it. You don’t need an expert to help you, you don’t need thousands of dollars and you don’t need to know anything apart from a bit of Googling. If you don’t have someone you know, you can always go to India, China, the Philippines. Offshoring these things has become very popular, it’s very well priced and the risk is so low. Especially because it’s all online stuff anyway, so you don’t really need to meet the person you’re working with.
We know about it all of this because our new clients have these stories behind them when they come to us.
At the turn of the century we began our education here about online business. Before Facebook, WordPress, WooCommerce, hashtags, ipads, iphones, internet on your cellphone, gmail, etc, etc, etc. We learned about how you could run or promote a business, but on the internet. It was quite a funny concept because it was new and not many people used the internet. They called it internet marketing back in those days. It was quite rudimentary because there wasn’t much in the way of tools.
In 2004 we developed our first online store for a client, using something called osCommerce. It was great, at the time. We worked with that client for a number of years since, and have seen them successfully sell the business to a new owner several times. They are still our client.
We’ve since worked with several other options, and were very excited when WooCommerce came along – our current software of choice.
In 2007, an opportunity came along for us to sell products online ourselves. Having had a number of years experience in online commerce already, we decided to give it a crack. We used several different solutions and launched half a dozen online store businesses of our own. They are separate from our core business and sell products.
Every day, we are taking orders, dealing to client queries and problems, generating quotations, proactively developing client relationships, contemplating our content and marketing strategies, looking into why we are getting a surge or a lull in sales. We’ve had various challenges on how to deal with payments, technical coding issues, delivery problems, having too little or too much stock, whether to upgrade the software for new features or leave as is, sites getting hacked into, sites stopping working, sites misbehaving.
Ongoing we’re always thinking about and looking into how our sites will talk to Facebook, how to sell through Facebook, what we should be doing on Facebook and others like Twitter, how much time should we invest in advertising on those, what is going on with Google Analytics, how does our site integrate with our invoicing system, what about our accounting system? What about our new accounting system? For our online store businesses, we’ve worked with individual, business, and Government clients. We’ve had very large sales and very small sales, and everything in between.
After 7 years we are not running a Kogan, ebay or other gargantuan online business. However, we are running a very successful online business, which began as something on the side and has become much more.
Most importantly, when we are talking to our potential clients, like you, about creating an online store business – whether that is replacing something existing that’s not so great, or making your dream to sell Widgets over the internet come true – we can say we know from experience what we’re talking about.
Yes of course, we still have web developers and designers as core team members. But what your everyday web designer or developer can’t give you is the experience that we have in actually running online businesses and doing that successfully.
We’re not multi-millionaires and we’re not promising we’ll make you one. We don’t have a silver bullet solution.
But partnering with you in the creation and growth of your online business means you have not only the technical & aesthetic support, and marketing advice to drive it forward, but perhaps something that we know will mean you’ll do something early that saves you 6 months. Or you’ll save a lot of money in initial setup costs that you realise later were far too high for what you needed to get running.
Running an online store business requires time, dedication and effort. Things will not always go perfectly and perhaps the idea will take more time that you thought to generate a profit.
If you’ve had issues or a disaster in the past and you’re looking for a solution or some advice on the next steps, why not give us a call with your thoughts? We might just have a solution.
Our number is 02 9955 2237, or you can email us via this page.